Crimean Kirill Barannik was transferred to Rostov-on-Don pretrial detention center No. 1. This was reported by Avtozak LIVE.
He is in a "basement" designed for 10 people - but instead it holds 34. Barannik is waiting to be transferred to a regular cell, he was promised that this will happen in two weeks. According to the young man, the prisoners do not have enough food and water.
The criminal case against Barannik and seven other Crimeans was received by the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don on April 12.
On May 30, 2023, 26-year-old Barannik was detained by FSB officers on the embankment in Simferopol, with a bag over his head. The young man was taken for interrogation, during which he confessed to committing sabotage in the village of Pochtovoye on February 23. Barannik said that the security forces threatened to kill his mother and tortured him several times. According to the young man, they once demanded that he confess to blowing up the railway near the village of Chistenkoye, but he refused to do so. “First, they tortured me with electricity, connecting electrical terminals to my fingers, toes, earlobes and buttocks. They threatened to rape me with a stick, then they beat me with their hands and feet on the body and head,” this is how Barannik described what happened. His lawyer confirmed that he saw burns, swelling and bruises on his client’s body.
Barannik's case was later linked to the case of the "sabotage group of Ukrainian agents" whose detention the FSB announced on May 3, 2023. The security forces claimed that the detainees were preparing an assassination attempt on the head of the annexed Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, and other "top officials" appointed by the Russian authorities. According to Avtozak LIVE, back in 2023, the security forces offered Barannik a deal with the investigation and testify against other "members of the terrorist community." After the refusal, the young man's charges were increased, replacing the article on sabotage (Article 281.1 of the Criminal Code) with articles on treason (Article 275 of the Criminal Code), possession of explosives by an organized group (Part 4 of Article 222.1 of the Criminal Code), smuggling explosives (Part 3 of Article 226.1 of the Criminal Code), participation in a terrorist group (Part 2 of Article 205.4 of the Criminal Code), committing terrorist acts (paragraphs "a" and "c" of Part 2 of Article 205 of the Criminal Code), and training in terrorist activities (Article 205.3 of the Criminal Code).
Kirill Barannik needs to raise 287,000 rubles to pay for a lawyer. Avtozak LIVE has opened a collection on the Zaodno platform to help Kirill's family pay for a lawyer. Zaodno is a platform through which you can safely directly support those persecuted for political reasons.
You can also support a young person by writing him a letter through the Zonatelecom service or by regular mail to the address:
Barannik Kirill Yuryevich, born in 1998
Pretrial detention center No. 1, Maxim Gorky St., 219, Rostov-on-Don, Rostov region, Russia, 344022
- Sabotage on the railways in Crimea becomes a reason for searches in the homes of Crimeans. Security forces came to their home on March 2 , March 10 , March 11 and March 12, 2023 in connection with damage to the railway track in the village of Pochtovoe. And in May, Crimean Tatar Mambet Asan-Usta said that he was kidnapped and interrogated in the case of sabotage on the railway in the village of Chistenkoye.
- Before the start of the full-scale war with Ukraine, people were rarely tried under the article on sabotage (Article 281 of the Criminal Code) in Russia — over the past ten years, courts have handed down several sentences per year, Mediazona found out . Since the fall of 2022, security forces have regularly initiated criminal cases under this article: the publication's journalists studied known materials and found out that almost three quarters of them talk about damage to relay cabinets on railways. In addition, at the end of 2022, the punishment for sabotage was toughened: three new related articles were introduced into the Criminal Code, one of which provides for life imprisonment.
- As a rule, the details of criminal cases on sabotage are almost unknown - information about them is mainly disseminated by security forces. In addition to the article on sabotage, some defendants are also charged with the article on a terrorist act (Article 205 of the Criminal Code) or its preparation. From the available data, it can be concluded that the initiation of cases under these articles is not always justified: not all cases have serious consequences for the operation of the railway, and some are quite insignificant. In many cases, the defendants said that they damaged relay cabinets and other equipment on the roads for little money. At the same time, in some cases it can be argued that arson was a way to oppose a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.